As sad as it seems, there are environmentalists who would sue in federal court to stop a mining operation on the Moon because such activity would adversely impact migration patterns and impact the aesthetics and visual appearance of the Moon itself. I could even see "lunar reclamation" efforts being required by mining companies doing large scale operations to "restore" craters and other features removed as a result of human activity.
I call this sad as there is no environment on the Moon to damage, except for some rocks and the (mostly) vacuum of space. Still, it isn't going to stop people from trying.
As far as NIMBY is concerned, the issue is huge as it is something in literally everybody's backyard, unless you live in a condo or something where you can't see the sky at night. Proximity to your house is not the issue. I would generally support the mining developers for an issue like this, but it will most likely happen at some point in the future using NIMBY-related aesthetics laws to at least throw up some sort of roadblocks.... until the legal status of the Moon is finally settled on a practical basis.
Te reason it won't work as a weapon directly is a matter of physics. Transmitters have to be designed and antennas shaped into certain patterns to maximize the power needed for transmitting at a given frequency. For applications in space in particular, a space solar power satellite would require the antennas to be working at frequencies that normally are "harmless" for people and things on the ground. You can't have your cake and eat it too for these applications.
Maybe, and this is a huge maybe, the evil mastermind "Doctor No" has put onto the power satellite some additional module that includes the evil death ray machine that can do all of the damage you are talking about where it diverts the power to this death ray module from the regular power transmitter.. That is additional cost and otherwise dead mass for most of its operational lifetime. That is now how you design spacecraft, and it would also be caught by anybody watching the development of these devices. Turning something like a power sat into a weapon would make it a military target, which would also be incredibly easy to destroy and impossible to defend. Its use in this fashion would also be causus belli for nuclear warfare and total war. Who would be that stupid when other easier ways to wipe out a country like America would also be available?
The real issue facing Eisenhower was the legal interpretation of what happened when a satellite flew over a country without permission. What he was hoping for (and what has become standard international practice) is that national territories don't apply to locations outside of the atmosphere.
Had America launched the first satellite, it is very likely that the USSR would have demanded the vehicle avoid "Soviet airspace" and asserted sovereignty to all of the space above their country. By permitting the first satellite to be a Soviet one, it established the precedence by flying over America so the opposite could also happen. That was a specific goal. That Yuri Gagarin became the first person into space was also something not really an accident for many of the same reaons, even though Alan Sheppard might have enjoyed that distinction.
I'm not going to be all that critical of military planners in America during the 1950's, as it was difficult or even impossible to really know what the Soviet Union was doing in terms of missile technology during the era except in hindsight using records that only now exist. I consider what happened there to be mostly a gut reaction to propaganda that the USSR was putting out, where "officially" the missile numbers were inflated for public consumption, but it was hard for military planners in America to dismiss the numbers as being too high.
It wasn't until reconnaissance satellites became common with skilled interpreters able to pick out real missiles from the fake ones that the actual numbers to be worried about could be planned for. By that time, the money spent on building up the American missile response had already taken place and the Soviet Union was mostly falling apart anyway as it eventually did.
Being an armchair quarterback for these events is all too easy unless you were actually there having to make these decisions.
Yeah, right. A microwave transmitter is going to be re-focused and re-tuned "in a matter of minutes" to become a weapon of some sort?
I'm not going to deny that such a device could be put to military purposes, but by far and away its most practical military purpose would be to act as a mobile power supply for advancing land forces. A divisional headquarters could throw up an antenna array in less than a day and could have that relocated in about the same length of time saving the need to set up a diesel generator truck.... and most importantly saving the need for a regular re-supply logistics to bring that fuel up to the HQ. If there are going to be fancy weapons tapping into that power supply, those are going to be on the ground and a part of that headquarters such as a rail gun or "laser turrets" that can tap into a high quality power supply.
That would make the power sat a military target in space, but its use as an actual weapon is rather dubious at best.
In-vehicle equipment has to survive a fairly hostile environment, including having to deal with a rather nasty electrical system that is primarily designed for one purpose: to operate spark plugs keeping an engine running. If you want to talk about line noise, I can't imagine anything harder to work around than the electrical system of an automobile.
Add on top of that the vibrations coming through the chassis, the sometimes extreme accelerations from within the automobile and then the wide range of expected operating temperatures (below freezing to well over 150 degrees Fahrenheit.... close to 100 Celsius). Essentially this is military grade electronics you are talking about for almost any automotive electrical device, so it shouldn't be too surprising that you are paying a premium for that kind of performance. That it costs $2500 is really a bargain. I promise that "standalone GPS system" would fall to pieces if mounted inside of a typical automobile for any length of time.
The U.S. effort to go to the Moon was followed up by Skylab, a Shuttle program, and the construction of the International Space Station (of which clearly the American involvement was quite large). Arguably that aspect of manned spaceflight was sustainable and certainly has been maintained. Dozens of follow-up spacecraft designs to succeed the Shuttle program have also been worked on by NASA... and it has been political infighting that has mostly created the current situation where NASA really doesn't have any option but to use the Soyuz spacecraft to launch its astronauts to the ISS at the moment. And there certainly are some people very much concerned this has been happening.
So far, the Chinese haven't even launched somebody into orbit at all for a couple of years. The last flight was in September 2008, although they are planning on a flight perhaps later on this year. Their big task they want to accomplish this year? An in-orbit rendezvous similar to what Neil Armstrong (yes, that Neil Armstrong) and David Scott performed during Gemini 8. That sounds like they are making huge progress, but it still is a long way to go before the Chinese are even able to even think about the Moon, much less be able to do large scale construction in space like something comparable to the ISS.
What concerns me most about China is their operational tempo. They haven't sent any people into space for a couple of years now, and they are being what I would call too cautious on doing stuff in space.
The largest problem that causes is the people involved in spaceflight simply don't have the experience necessary to do anything once they get up there. Skills people need to refine require regular flights and repeating activities over and over again to smooth over problem and not to keep making the same mistakes. You could argue this is the same problem facing the American spaceflight activities, but China takes that slow pace to another level entirely.
Unless China is willing to seriously invest into spaceflight and ramp up the number of spacecraft launched in a single year, this space station simply isn't going to be built.
By comparison, SpaceX is ramping up its operational tempo, as is Bigelow Aerospace. Both have expanded their factories and their production staff to have regular flight necessary. SpaceX is planning on launching on roughly a monthly basis with potentially having people being launched several times per year.... and they are leaving open the possibility to ramp up that production rate even more. To get that to work out properly, that would require several engines to be built every week, with perhaps an engine being produced every day over a pretty prolonged period of time. That in turn drops costs because it creates a genuine production line where repeating manufacturing skills pays off.
This is what NASA claimed they were going to be doing with the Space Shuttle program when they were trying to sell it to Congress back in the 1970's.... with the suggestion that a shuttle launch would be happening about twice a month or so when they "worked out the bugs". Of course that kind of flow rate never happened, but at least it was talked about and the need for that kind of operational tempo is also why the NASA astronaut corps numbered close to a hundred astronauts during the peak of the Shuttle program.
China isn't doing anything like this, and their astronaut corps is just a very small handful of people. Talk is big here, but until they start to really do stuff in space, I won't really be impressed. It doesn't have to be necessarily going to the Moon here either and they can be practical in terms of doing stuff in space, but they have to be up in space doing stuff or they can't really be taken seriously.
If you can find a way to profitably ship finished "investment grade" platinum bars from the Moon to the Earth for less than $1800 per ounce, perhaps you have a point. That is the real trick, isn't it? That is assuming the bars are simply sitting on the surface of the Moon already refined, assayed, and prepared for shipment with no other costs involved in their preparation to get them to that point (which takes some effort). Add on top of that the expense of shipping mining equipment to the Moon that presumably will have to be built on the Earth and that cost will somehow have to be amortized by the activities on the Moon, and even platinum doesn't seem to work out very well unless you can ship stuff to LEO for about $10/kg. Well, maybe $50/kg if you are pushing it.
Helium-3 is a better case, as it is currently purchased and sold for $4000 per gram, or about $100,000 per ounce. The problem with He-3 is that the market at the moment is so small that any significant quantities of the stuff would drive the price down. In small quantities (something an astronaut could hand-carry for a return trip from the Moon) perhaps you could set up a pilot project just to test extraction techniques and make some sort of celebration of the fact that you have mined something valuable that would be difficult to do on the Earth, but that is a bit of a stretch to suggest a profitable mining effort could still happen on the Moon for an extended period of time.
About the only thing I've seen suggested on the Moon that would have value and is being legitimately suggested for a lunar mining operation is ordinary water. For shipment to the Earth, that is about the most cruel joke I could imagine, as I can get a ton of that stuff delivered to my kitchen for just a few dollars using extraction methods already common here on the Earth. As something useful for deep space exploration, the business case is much better but even that requires an infrastructure in space that doesn't exist yet and won't cheaply be put together either. Yes, I'm aware that a private mining group has proposed the idea of doing lunar resource extraction.... but at the moment that is pure vaporware to me until they actually get equipment into space for at least a pilot project.
This certainly isn't going to be a reason for China to get to the Moon, and their launch costs are currently insanely high.
I'll be impressed when the Chinese do a manned in-orbit rendezvous, essentially reproducing the efforts of Gemini 8. Yes, I admit that only NASA and the Russian Space Agency are the only people who have attempted this effort, but I would think it is sort of essential if you are planning on some sort of space station.
Mars? I'm setting my sights a bit lower to the Earth first. The Chinese really aren't all that advanced, and it is going to take a whole lot more to impress me first. Spaceflight is hard, and the Chinese don't have the operational tempo necessary to make it to the Moon, much less Mars.
While the technologies don't exist, the basic principles do exist and machinery which can be adapted for use in space is also being used currently for terrestrial mining operations... including teleoperated mining equipment and extraction techniques which could be applied to a space environment. There are also a number of features to working in a vacuum and microgravity environment that can significantly help in terms of metallurgy.
Two things that constantly plague metal production here on the Earth are the strong gravitational field.... which produces eddies and even prevents some metals from even mixing in large quantities due to extreme differences in mass. The other is the nearly constant presence of oxygen that requires elaborate processes to "reduce" the oxygen in the materials and the manufacturing process. Steel manufacturing processes, for instance, are constantly fighting the oxygen not only in the iron itself, but also in the environment of the blast furnace.
On the Moon this can be done much easier simply by pointing a parabolic solar mirror at some iron ore and waiting for it to melt. Heck, the steel slag left over after the process may not even be the most critical by-product on the Moon as it may be the oxygen you are after in the first place.
I guess what I'm trying to point out is that there are a whole bunch of options, and it isn't like the really hard engineering problems of simply trying to get off of the Earth in the first place. That is a tough challenge, but it is something which has been done. I'm not saying extraction of materials in space is going to be easy, but the reason for the lack of technologies to get it done has more to do with the fact that getting there in the first place is so difficult that the technologies to do anything once you get there haven't even been tried.
The Russians have zero experience with a fractional gravity environment.... nobody does because such studies or environments simply don't exist yet and never have. This isn't to say that it can't be built or that people could go to the Moon or Mars, but at least until now nobody has been on another celestial body for more than a couple days to know what the long-term health problems might be.
Note that I'm not talking zero gravity, but a fractional gravity environment like the Moon, or perhaps being inside of a spinning wheel where the "acceleration" you experience is roughly equivalent to the Moon. I guarantee that neither the Russians, the Chinese, nor the Americans have any experience with this at all.
Yes, we know what effects very "microgravity" environments are like, such as exist on the ISS, MIR, or on Skylab. Both NASA and the Russian space agency have extensive data on the nearly 500 astronauts who have been into space already including many from multiple countries who have spent months to close to a year in space. Yes, that effect is significant, but we don't know if those effects can be reduced or eliminated in a partial gravity environment.
Technically, SpaceX is required by law to declare a profit off of the Falcon rockets due to the fact that they have taken deposits and that the rockets they have in the production queue are at certain stages of delivery. This is similar to other companies that produce "durable goods" and items that require significant capital investment, so it isn't unique to SpaceX. As a result, SpaceX has been in the black for a couple of years now and is indeed making a profit. That flights have been happening only makes that work out all that much more.
What hurts me the most is to see things like the OTRAG and the Constogea get killed strictly for political reasons. Constogea in particular was killed by none other than the Space Shuttle program, where NASA at the time published a payload price schedule for commercial loads that simply was a pure fabricated lie of the worst kind. Not only could NASA not meet that price point (as if NASA was a commercial entity unto themselves.... they fancied themselves at the time as a space version of the Post Office Department), but they simply didn't even fly more than a couple commercial payloads and then in turn canceled that program entirely when the Challenger blew up.
If you want to see something really horrid, I'd suggest reading up on the Telstar satellites put up by AT&T. AT&T paid an extra premium for the launch of that satellite and had to get special authorization from Congress in the form of a law that explicitly gave permission for just that one launch. Here was a company flowing with money and wanting to take advantage of going into space, yet because the satellite wasn't invented by or built with engineers from NASA or the Department of Defense, they had to jump through extra hurdles just to get it into space. Once the satellite actually got up into space and then proven to be a profitable business (telecommunications satellites), what did Congress do to thank AT&T for their investment in this area? They granted a monopoly to one of AT&T's competitors and by law killed the space technology division at AT&T (since they couldn't really send anything up into space any more).
I could go on as there have been many other attempts to get real private commercial spaceflight to happen. MIRcorp was another example of some very forward thinking that was killed by the U.S. government.... and quite recently too. Unless you have provided prostitutes, generous campaign contributions, and brought key congressmen out to very fancy restaurants (and of course offered them a speaking fee as well as purchasing copies of their autobiography), you simply won't get a successful business running in space.
This dismal situation changed a little bit with the Ansari X-Prize, where at last commercial spaceflight could prove they could make something to at least go into space without NASA or for that matter any government financing. Many said it couldn't be done. The key is to prove them wrong and show that people can go into space on their own dime if you can keep the government out of their hair.
The most significant event in the past decade for spaceflight was the passage of the Commercial Spaceflight Act that established the FAA-AST as the government agency with the authority to regulate commercial spaceflight activities in America. Until that happened, nobody could legally go into space even if they wanted to without a congressional commission. After that happened, finally a private citizen could do stuff in space. I get that you need to prove you aren't going to fly your rockets into the Empire State Building or do something else equally stupid that could really hurt others, but the red tape reduction has really made a difference.
The issue here is that you are so caught up in being a troll that you can't possibly see past the end of your nose. If you were offering an intelligent argument here that perhaps corrected an error in my thinking and offered an honest rebuttal, perhaps I can take you much more seriously here.
Unfortunately, you are so caught up in ad hominim attacks that we can't possible carry on an intelligent conversation. I can only presume that the only reason you post anonymously is because you know in your heart that you are being a jerk and that you would have negative karma making all of your comments invisible.... as they should be.
If you could offer some commentary that didn't attack me on a personal basis, perhaps I might be more willing to actually reply with a stronger argument. Otherwise, you are a sad waste of space in this universe.
I think the cost per pound is several orders of magnitude cheaper than you are suggesting, but I admit it is still very expensive to pull something from the Moon and bring it to the Earth. The question there is in terms of how cheap can you make a bulk good transportation system (you don't have to worry about squishing something organic, so you can be rough with it) that can make it to the Earth.
He3 prices right now, on the open market from terrestrial sources, are about $4,000 per gram, or about $100,000 per ounce. That at least is a legitimate target for a business case and if you can get the transportation costs cheaper than that price including extraction costs. That is why it is something being talked about specifically as a profitable venture for a mining operation. Even at that price, there are organizations and businesses who will pay that kind of price for the substance, so it isn't completely out of the question. That is the price if it is used as a refrigerant.
If practical controlled fusion reactors ever get produced, it is possible that the value of He3 could soar to millions of dollars per ounce essentially closing the business case completely simply due to increased demand. Yes, it is something that is practical, and I'm pointing out an existing application that does not require fusion to even work and still can at least be marginally profitable even if you extract it on the Moon and bring it to the Earth in relatively modest quantities.
The real reason why costs haven't been dropping is because of pure economics.
Keep in mind that Moore's law works for chips because a 50% drop in price can increase sales by 500% (more or less.... follow me on this point for a moment). Back in about 1950, the total number of computers being manufactured could fit on one hand, and there was a famous economist who honestly predicted that the total number of computers needed world-wide was just five. Considering the applications at the time, that was actually a fair estimate and you could even name off the customers (U.S. Army, Census Bureau, IRS, a consortium of banks, and one for Europe).
Gordon Moore himself gave a talk at a conference about microprocessors about 1970 where the discussion was about the number of microprocessors that might be needed world-wide. They did realize at the time the number was a bit more than five, but based upon growth trends they tried to predict how many microprocessors might be manufactured by the year 2000. They came up with something close to about 10 billion CPUs.... and then somebody gave a remark that would imply there would be a microprocessor for every doorknob in all the hotels of the world... making a joke. A subsequent conference by many of the same people happened in 2000.... and sure enough there were microprocessors in every doorknob of the hotel where the conference was being held... and those really weren't remarkable by that time. This has happened because the demand for those processors is almost insatiable and as the price drops many new applications can be found to use those processors. There are now legitimate applications (RFID tags, for instance) where having a microprocessor for 10 cents is still too expensive.... so cheaper processors are being made where every can of Coca-Cola could conceivably have a microprocessor.
Bringing this to spaceflight, the issue is how can you find some markets for spaceflight where a 50% drop in the price to orbit will give you more than a 100% increase in flights? So far, the opposite has been happening, where a 50% drop in price only gets you a 10%-20% increase in customers. That is a horrible position to be in unless you are also stealing customers (as SpaceX is doing) from other launcher companies due to you being a new entrant in the market.
This is precisely why many have suggested that SpaceX may eventually raise prices for launches, because the market will bear the price. If they raise prices 100% and only lose 20% of their customers in the process.... what do they have to lose? That is precisely what Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and the other traditional launcher groups have been doing for some time. Putting a communications satellite into orbit that costs billions of dollars to manufacture in the first place can easily afford to spend a quarter of a billion on launching costs.... so they don't care if they spend a little more as long as the rocket is reliable or at least covered by insurance if it fails. This is also why launch costs until recently have been increasing much faster than inflation.
If we can find some markets for spaceflight (space tourism BTW is one of those markets) where the number of customers increases substantially with even a modest drop in price, a launcher company can make of the loss of profits through volume sales and thus make more profit. That is generally true for many other industries of which computers is particularly true, but hasn't been the case for spaceflight.
I am still undecided if the economic case is prevalent for spaceflight to become much cheaper, and space tourism by itself isn't sufficient to make it happen. Scientific research in space gets it much closer to closing the business case, but not quite. What pushes it well over the edge is space mining.... but unfortunately that requires a huge drop in price before it becomes affordable to bring back refined rare earth metals or platinum from space and the process to bootstrap mining in space simply won't happen if launching a bottle of
I do like the concepts put out by JP Aerospace and their proposal to use airships and some interesting staging in order to get into orbit. It certainly is an innovative approach that if it works out could significantly reduce the cost of access to space by another order of magnitude or more and would make bulk cargo delivery of supplies from the Earth practical. Its only major drawback is that it takes days or weeks in order to get to orbit rather than a few minutes.... and for passenger delivery that might not be the best way to go other than for "steerage" passengers that have no other option available. For bulk goods like rocket fuel, that certainly wouldn't be a problem except for cryogenic issues and even that might have "acceptable losses".
Most of what you say is spot on, and I hope that eventually somebody will start to really work on these things with some real money behind the projects.
There really haven't been any studies conducted on long term exposure to a fractional gravity environment. It is sort of hard to simulate on the Earth, and hasn't been done in space yet. It may be possible to at least halt some bone degeneration if you are exposed to at least some sort of modest acceleration, such as with a rotating wheel of some sort.
Perhaps a greater moral implication would be if the trip to Mars was a one-way trip.... for them and all their posterity. I'm not saying that would necessarily be the case and it may be possible for a young person born on Mars to return and live for the rest of their life on the Earth, but if it becomes a total one-way trip it certainly would change how people perceive travels to that planet.
I'm trying hard to think of some other transportation moguls that have gone down in history like Elon might if he pulls this off. A short list to which Elon might be included someday:
Cornelius Vanderbilt (steamships)
Leland Stanford (railroads)
Henry Ford (automobiles)
David Sarnoff (radio)
Howard Hughes (aviation)
Bill Gates (computer operating systems)
I'm sure you could put add to this list, although it should be noted that none of them really "invented" the thing they are most noted for being associated with as others most definitely preceded them with those inventions and even were competitors. All of these men had egos so huge that even mastery of their particular industry wasn't sufficient. Stanford even went so far as to become governor of California and now has a university named after him. The companies they founded are even all around today (at least in some form).
I'm sure that would stroke the ego of Elon Musk to be included in such a list. Even so, I have to agree with this AC poster that the "conquest of Mars" would permanently enshrine SpaceX and Musk in history books for much of the rest of human history.
Be careful with this guy, he is a noted troll that is as ignorant of spaceflight as he thinks others might have about it. Of course some people think they should do and ignore those who say "no".
I think ITER is going to be a dead end, and is a good example of everything that is wrong with big science and massive research projects. Even if it ends up being energy positive, facilities built using that method are going to be very expensive and mostly custom one-off projects.... pretty much all of the problems that fission plants face and a few new problems on top of that. It certainly isn't going to be "the solution" to solving the world's energy problems even if it works.
If you could build a fusion reactor to fit as the core of a rocket engine (and keep the weight down too), it could conceivably be the route to significantly cut travel time around the solar system. A trip to Mars would be a matter of weeks rather than months, and "artificial gravity" would be due to actual acceleration rather than a centrifuge or some other similar system.
I hope that they get it to work, or at least some method of fusion working at a break-even or better level, but it is currently a shot in the dark. There are other approaches to fusion that might end up working better.
The escape clause is perhaps the one part of the treaty that removes any teeth in the document:
Any State Party to the Treaty may give notice of its withdrawal from the Treaty one year after its entry into force by written notification to the Depositary Governments. Such withdrawal shall take effect one year from the date of receipt of this notification.
There is nothing that really holds the signers of the treaty to really follow the principles in the treaty. If the need to claim extra-terrestrial real estate comes up, the nation seeking such a claim simply needs to withdraw and wait a year before they have to act. Some other countries might be clogging the local plumbing fixtures if that happens, but the whole treaty is basically a "Mexican stand-off" just waiting for somebody to make the first move before the land rush starts in earnest.
The Moon Treaty tried to fix those "problems", but the countries who ratified that treaty are not the ones that really matter. It nearly was ratified by the U.S. Senate, but the L-5 Society and some other space advocacy groups got some lobbying going before the final vote and instead it was rejected.
You have got to both get a life and learn when to shut up.
The timeshare computing systems were indeed invented by contractors working for the space program, including the timeshare systems. Yes, I'm very much aware of the Dartmouth system.... what do you think motivated these guys to get it going in the first place? NASA needed a system that permitted multiple individuals working simultaneously on the same computer for controlling the rocket. That others worked on related systems and that the argument for who was first can be disputed is more after the fact. BTW... note the dates that you are using here when trying to defend when these systems were developed.... and also note what was happening in terms of NASA funding.
BTW, "real-time operating systems" were also developed for the space program, where timed events could be controlled as well as automated abort systems for the rockets. I really would love to see you find how spaceflight activities had nothing to do with that.
I'm tired of responding to you, especially as you post anonymously and don't have the balls to stand up to your own words with your own name. I guess as a troll on space related stories, you've had a pretty good week.
The amount being spent for the catering is still chicken feed and lost in the statistical noise of the budgetary process. My point is that fuel costs are so minor that it isn't even worth mentioning as an issue for getting into space. Still, your point is valid that setting up a fancy tent with catering staff, plush folding chairs, drinks, and a buffet table for the reporters does seem like an extravagance.
Then again, if you keep the press corps happy they tend to write positive stories about your organization. This is a PR trick as old as it gets, and something these reporters actually expect. If you snub a reporter where they eat some bad chicken at one of these events, they are likely to rip into your organization.... so they do tend to get some very royal treatment at planned events like a space launch. NASA funding depends upon good press reports (or at least no bad news stories) so the expense continues.
Members of "the press" also get a goody bag filled with signed autographs of the astronauts, a media kit (often a book.... sometimes hard covered) that has biographies of all of the astronauts and background information about the spacecraft, and sometimes a few toys and other stuff. A "reporter's notebook" is also often included along with a pile of pencils, pens, and perhaps even a flashlight. Coupons to local merchants aren't out of the question either, not to mention free "wi-fi" or even a hard network connection with broadband speeds.
NASA PR representatives are pros at the job and are especially noted for how well they put on a party for the press.
The two major contributions to computing technology that the Apollo program had was the development of timeshare computing (developed at JSC for mission control) and the use of integrated circuits in the Apollo Guidance Computer.... one of the first large purchases of those chips at a critical time in the development of the microchip industry. At the time NASA accounted for over half of all chip sales in the world, which gave the cash infusion necessary to get the chip fabs established.
While not "inventing modern computing technology", it was an important part of early computing.
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As sad as it seems, there are environmentalists who would sue in federal court to stop a mining operation on the Moon because such activity would adversely impact migration patterns and impact the aesthetics and visual appearance of the Moon itself. I could even see "lunar reclamation" efforts being required by mining companies doing large scale operations to "restore" craters and other features removed as a result of human activity.
I call this sad as there is no environment on the Moon to damage, except for some rocks and the (mostly) vacuum of space. Still, it isn't going to stop people from trying.
As far as NIMBY is concerned, the issue is huge as it is something in literally everybody's backyard, unless you live in a condo or something where you can't see the sky at night. Proximity to your house is not the issue. I would generally support the mining developers for an issue like this, but it will most likely happen at some point in the future using NIMBY-related aesthetics laws to at least throw up some sort of roadblocks.... until the legal status of the Moon is finally settled on a practical basis.
Te reason it won't work as a weapon directly is a matter of physics. Transmitters have to be designed and antennas shaped into certain patterns to maximize the power needed for transmitting at a given frequency. For applications in space in particular, a space solar power satellite would require the antennas to be working at frequencies that normally are "harmless" for people and things on the ground. You can't have your cake and eat it too for these applications.
Maybe, and this is a huge maybe, the evil mastermind "Doctor No" has put onto the power satellite some additional module that includes the evil death ray machine that can do all of the damage you are talking about where it diverts the power to this death ray module from the regular power transmitter.. That is additional cost and otherwise dead mass for most of its operational lifetime. That is now how you design spacecraft, and it would also be caught by anybody watching the development of these devices. Turning something like a power sat into a weapon would make it a military target, which would also be incredibly easy to destroy and impossible to defend. Its use in this fashion would also be causus belli for nuclear warfare and total war. Who would be that stupid when other easier ways to wipe out a country like America would also be available?
The real issue facing Eisenhower was the legal interpretation of what happened when a satellite flew over a country without permission. What he was hoping for (and what has become standard international practice) is that national territories don't apply to locations outside of the atmosphere.
Had America launched the first satellite, it is very likely that the USSR would have demanded the vehicle avoid "Soviet airspace" and asserted sovereignty to all of the space above their country. By permitting the first satellite to be a Soviet one, it established the precedence by flying over America so the opposite could also happen. That was a specific goal. That Yuri Gagarin became the first person into space was also something not really an accident for many of the same reaons, even though Alan Sheppard might have enjoyed that distinction.
I'm not going to be all that critical of military planners in America during the 1950's, as it was difficult or even impossible to really know what the Soviet Union was doing in terms of missile technology during the era except in hindsight using records that only now exist. I consider what happened there to be mostly a gut reaction to propaganda that the USSR was putting out, where "officially" the missile numbers were inflated for public consumption, but it was hard for military planners in America to dismiss the numbers as being too high.
It wasn't until reconnaissance satellites became common with skilled interpreters able to pick out real missiles from the fake ones that the actual numbers to be worried about could be planned for. By that time, the money spent on building up the American missile response had already taken place and the Soviet Union was mostly falling apart anyway as it eventually did.
Being an armchair quarterback for these events is all too easy unless you were actually there having to make these decisions.
Yeah, right. A microwave transmitter is going to be re-focused and re-tuned "in a matter of minutes" to become a weapon of some sort?
I'm not going to deny that such a device could be put to military purposes, but by far and away its most practical military purpose would be to act as a mobile power supply for advancing land forces. A divisional headquarters could throw up an antenna array in less than a day and could have that relocated in about the same length of time saving the need to set up a diesel generator truck.... and most importantly saving the need for a regular re-supply logistics to bring that fuel up to the HQ. If there are going to be fancy weapons tapping into that power supply, those are going to be on the ground and a part of that headquarters such as a rail gun or "laser turrets" that can tap into a high quality power supply.
That would make the power sat a military target in space, but its use as an actual weapon is rather dubious at best.
In-vehicle equipment has to survive a fairly hostile environment, including having to deal with a rather nasty electrical system that is primarily designed for one purpose: to operate spark plugs keeping an engine running. If you want to talk about line noise, I can't imagine anything harder to work around than the electrical system of an automobile.
Add on top of that the vibrations coming through the chassis, the sometimes extreme accelerations from within the automobile and then the wide range of expected operating temperatures (below freezing to well over 150 degrees Fahrenheit.... close to 100 Celsius). Essentially this is military grade electronics you are talking about for almost any automotive electrical device, so it shouldn't be too surprising that you are paying a premium for that kind of performance. That it costs $2500 is really a bargain. I promise that "standalone GPS system" would fall to pieces if mounted inside of a typical automobile for any length of time.
The U.S. effort to go to the Moon was followed up by Skylab, a Shuttle program, and the construction of the International Space Station (of which clearly the American involvement was quite large). Arguably that aspect of manned spaceflight was sustainable and certainly has been maintained. Dozens of follow-up spacecraft designs to succeed the Shuttle program have also been worked on by NASA... and it has been political infighting that has mostly created the current situation where NASA really doesn't have any option but to use the Soyuz spacecraft to launch its astronauts to the ISS at the moment. And there certainly are some people very much concerned this has been happening.
So far, the Chinese haven't even launched somebody into orbit at all for a couple of years. The last flight was in September 2008, although they are planning on a flight perhaps later on this year. Their big task they want to accomplish this year? An in-orbit rendezvous similar to what Neil Armstrong (yes, that Neil Armstrong) and David Scott performed during Gemini 8. That sounds like they are making huge progress, but it still is a long way to go before the Chinese are even able to even think about the Moon, much less be able to do large scale construction in space like something comparable to the ISS.
What concerns me most about China is their operational tempo. They haven't sent any people into space for a couple of years now, and they are being what I would call too cautious on doing stuff in space.
The largest problem that causes is the people involved in spaceflight simply don't have the experience necessary to do anything once they get up there. Skills people need to refine require regular flights and repeating activities over and over again to smooth over problem and not to keep making the same mistakes. You could argue this is the same problem facing the American spaceflight activities, but China takes that slow pace to another level entirely.
Unless China is willing to seriously invest into spaceflight and ramp up the number of spacecraft launched in a single year, this space station simply isn't going to be built.
By comparison, SpaceX is ramping up its operational tempo, as is Bigelow Aerospace. Both have expanded their factories and their production staff to have regular flight necessary. SpaceX is planning on launching on roughly a monthly basis with potentially having people being launched several times per year.... and they are leaving open the possibility to ramp up that production rate even more. To get that to work out properly, that would require several engines to be built every week, with perhaps an engine being produced every day over a pretty prolonged period of time. That in turn drops costs because it creates a genuine production line where repeating manufacturing skills pays off.
This is what NASA claimed they were going to be doing with the Space Shuttle program when they were trying to sell it to Congress back in the 1970's.... with the suggestion that a shuttle launch would be happening about twice a month or so when they "worked out the bugs". Of course that kind of flow rate never happened, but at least it was talked about and the need for that kind of operational tempo is also why the NASA astronaut corps numbered close to a hundred astronauts during the peak of the Shuttle program.
China isn't doing anything like this, and their astronaut corps is just a very small handful of people. Talk is big here, but until they start to really do stuff in space, I won't really be impressed. It doesn't have to be necessarily going to the Moon here either and they can be practical in terms of doing stuff in space, but they have to be up in space doing stuff or they can't really be taken seriously.
If you can find a way to profitably ship finished "investment grade" platinum bars from the Moon to the Earth for less than $1800 per ounce, perhaps you have a point. That is the real trick, isn't it? That is assuming the bars are simply sitting on the surface of the Moon already refined, assayed, and prepared for shipment with no other costs involved in their preparation to get them to that point (which takes some effort). Add on top of that the expense of shipping mining equipment to the Moon that presumably will have to be built on the Earth and that cost will somehow have to be amortized by the activities on the Moon, and even platinum doesn't seem to work out very well unless you can ship stuff to LEO for about $10/kg. Well, maybe $50/kg if you are pushing it.
Helium-3 is a better case, as it is currently purchased and sold for $4000 per gram, or about $100,000 per ounce. The problem with He-3 is that the market at the moment is so small that any significant quantities of the stuff would drive the price down. In small quantities (something an astronaut could hand-carry for a return trip from the Moon) perhaps you could set up a pilot project just to test extraction techniques and make some sort of celebration of the fact that you have mined something valuable that would be difficult to do on the Earth, but that is a bit of a stretch to suggest a profitable mining effort could still happen on the Moon for an extended period of time.
About the only thing I've seen suggested on the Moon that would have value and is being legitimately suggested for a lunar mining operation is ordinary water. For shipment to the Earth, that is about the most cruel joke I could imagine, as I can get a ton of that stuff delivered to my kitchen for just a few dollars using extraction methods already common here on the Earth. As something useful for deep space exploration, the business case is much better but even that requires an infrastructure in space that doesn't exist yet and won't cheaply be put together either. Yes, I'm aware that a private mining group has proposed the idea of doing lunar resource extraction.... but at the moment that is pure vaporware to me until they actually get equipment into space for at least a pilot project.
This certainly isn't going to be a reason for China to get to the Moon, and their launch costs are currently insanely high.
I'll be impressed when the Chinese do a manned in-orbit rendezvous, essentially reproducing the efforts of Gemini 8. Yes, I admit that only NASA and the Russian Space Agency are the only people who have attempted this effort, but I would think it is sort of essential if you are planning on some sort of space station.
Mars? I'm setting my sights a bit lower to the Earth first. The Chinese really aren't all that advanced, and it is going to take a whole lot more to impress me first. Spaceflight is hard, and the Chinese don't have the operational tempo necessary to make it to the Moon, much less Mars.
While the technologies don't exist, the basic principles do exist and machinery which can be adapted for use in space is also being used currently for terrestrial mining operations... including teleoperated mining equipment and extraction techniques which could be applied to a space environment. There are also a number of features to working in a vacuum and microgravity environment that can significantly help in terms of metallurgy.
Two things that constantly plague metal production here on the Earth are the strong gravitational field.... which produces eddies and even prevents some metals from even mixing in large quantities due to extreme differences in mass. The other is the nearly constant presence of oxygen that requires elaborate processes to "reduce" the oxygen in the materials and the manufacturing process. Steel manufacturing processes, for instance, are constantly fighting the oxygen not only in the iron itself, but also in the environment of the blast furnace.
On the Moon this can be done much easier simply by pointing a parabolic solar mirror at some iron ore and waiting for it to melt. Heck, the steel slag left over after the process may not even be the most critical by-product on the Moon as it may be the oxygen you are after in the first place.
I guess what I'm trying to point out is that there are a whole bunch of options, and it isn't like the really hard engineering problems of simply trying to get off of the Earth in the first place. That is a tough challenge, but it is something which has been done. I'm not saying extraction of materials in space is going to be easy, but the reason for the lack of technologies to get it done has more to do with the fact that getting there in the first place is so difficult that the technologies to do anything once you get there haven't even been tried.
The Russians have zero experience with a fractional gravity environment.... nobody does because such studies or environments simply don't exist yet and never have. This isn't to say that it can't be built or that people could go to the Moon or Mars, but at least until now nobody has been on another celestial body for more than a couple days to know what the long-term health problems might be.
Note that I'm not talking zero gravity, but a fractional gravity environment like the Moon, or perhaps being inside of a spinning wheel where the "acceleration" you experience is roughly equivalent to the Moon. I guarantee that neither the Russians, the Chinese, nor the Americans have any experience with this at all.
Yes, we know what effects very "microgravity" environments are like, such as exist on the ISS, MIR, or on Skylab. Both NASA and the Russian space agency have extensive data on the nearly 500 astronauts who have been into space already including many from multiple countries who have spent months to close to a year in space. Yes, that effect is significant, but we don't know if those effects can be reduced or eliminated in a partial gravity environment.
Technically, SpaceX is required by law to declare a profit off of the Falcon rockets due to the fact that they have taken deposits and that the rockets they have in the production queue are at certain stages of delivery. This is similar to other companies that produce "durable goods" and items that require significant capital investment, so it isn't unique to SpaceX. As a result, SpaceX has been in the black for a couple of years now and is indeed making a profit. That flights have been happening only makes that work out all that much more.
What hurts me the most is to see things like the OTRAG and the Constogea get killed strictly for political reasons. Constogea in particular was killed by none other than the Space Shuttle program, where NASA at the time published a payload price schedule for commercial loads that simply was a pure fabricated lie of the worst kind. Not only could NASA not meet that price point (as if NASA was a commercial entity unto themselves.... they fancied themselves at the time as a space version of the Post Office Department), but they simply didn't even fly more than a couple commercial payloads and then in turn canceled that program entirely when the Challenger blew up.
If you want to see something really horrid, I'd suggest reading up on the Telstar satellites put up by AT&T. AT&T paid an extra premium for the launch of that satellite and had to get special authorization from Congress in the form of a law that explicitly gave permission for just that one launch. Here was a company flowing with money and wanting to take advantage of going into space, yet because the satellite wasn't invented by or built with engineers from NASA or the Department of Defense, they had to jump through extra hurdles just to get it into space. Once the satellite actually got up into space and then proven to be a profitable business (telecommunications satellites), what did Congress do to thank AT&T for their investment in this area? They granted a monopoly to one of AT&T's competitors and by law killed the space technology division at AT&T (since they couldn't really send anything up into space any more).
I could go on as there have been many other attempts to get real private commercial spaceflight to happen. MIRcorp was another example of some very forward thinking that was killed by the U.S. government.... and quite recently too. Unless you have provided prostitutes, generous campaign contributions, and brought key congressmen out to very fancy restaurants (and of course offered them a speaking fee as well as purchasing copies of their autobiography), you simply won't get a successful business running in space.
This dismal situation changed a little bit with the Ansari X-Prize, where at last commercial spaceflight could prove they could make something to at least go into space without NASA or for that matter any government financing. Many said it couldn't be done. The key is to prove them wrong and show that people can go into space on their own dime if you can keep the government out of their hair.
The most significant event in the past decade for spaceflight was the passage of the Commercial Spaceflight Act that established the FAA-AST as the government agency with the authority to regulate commercial spaceflight activities in America. Until that happened, nobody could legally go into space even if they wanted to without a congressional commission. After that happened, finally a private citizen could do stuff in space. I get that you need to prove you aren't going to fly your rockets into the Empire State Building or do something else equally stupid that could really hurt others, but the red tape reduction has really made a difference.
The issue here is that you are so caught up in being a troll that you can't possibly see past the end of your nose. If you were offering an intelligent argument here that perhaps corrected an error in my thinking and offered an honest rebuttal, perhaps I can take you much more seriously here.
Unfortunately, you are so caught up in ad hominim attacks that we can't possible carry on an intelligent conversation. I can only presume that the only reason you post anonymously is because you know in your heart that you are being a jerk and that you would have negative karma making all of your comments invisible.... as they should be.
If you could offer some commentary that didn't attack me on a personal basis, perhaps I might be more willing to actually reply with a stronger argument. Otherwise, you are a sad waste of space in this universe.
I think the cost per pound is several orders of magnitude cheaper than you are suggesting, but I admit it is still very expensive to pull something from the Moon and bring it to the Earth. The question there is in terms of how cheap can you make a bulk good transportation system (you don't have to worry about squishing something organic, so you can be rough with it) that can make it to the Earth.
He3 prices right now, on the open market from terrestrial sources, are about $4,000 per gram, or about $100,000 per ounce. That at least is a legitimate target for a business case and if you can get the transportation costs cheaper than that price including extraction costs. That is why it is something being talked about specifically as a profitable venture for a mining operation. Even at that price, there are organizations and businesses who will pay that kind of price for the substance, so it isn't completely out of the question. That is the price if it is used as a refrigerant.
If practical controlled fusion reactors ever get produced, it is possible that the value of He3 could soar to millions of dollars per ounce essentially closing the business case completely simply due to increased demand. Yes, it is something that is practical, and I'm pointing out an existing application that does not require fusion to even work and still can at least be marginally profitable even if you extract it on the Moon and bring it to the Earth in relatively modest quantities.
The real reason why costs haven't been dropping is because of pure economics.
Keep in mind that Moore's law works for chips because a 50% drop in price can increase sales by 500% (more or less.... follow me on this point for a moment). Back in about 1950, the total number of computers being manufactured could fit on one hand, and there was a famous economist who honestly predicted that the total number of computers needed world-wide was just five. Considering the applications at the time, that was actually a fair estimate and you could even name off the customers (U.S. Army, Census Bureau, IRS, a consortium of banks, and one for Europe).
Gordon Moore himself gave a talk at a conference about microprocessors about 1970 where the discussion was about the number of microprocessors that might be needed world-wide. They did realize at the time the number was a bit more than five, but based upon growth trends they tried to predict how many microprocessors might be manufactured by the year 2000. They came up with something close to about 10 billion CPUs.... and then somebody gave a remark that would imply there would be a microprocessor for every doorknob in all the hotels of the world... making a joke. A subsequent conference by many of the same people happened in 2000.... and sure enough there were microprocessors in every doorknob of the hotel where the conference was being held... and those really weren't remarkable by that time. This has happened because the demand for those processors is almost insatiable and as the price drops many new applications can be found to use those processors. There are now legitimate applications (RFID tags, for instance) where having a microprocessor for 10 cents is still too expensive.... so cheaper processors are being made where every can of Coca-Cola could conceivably have a microprocessor.
Bringing this to spaceflight, the issue is how can you find some markets for spaceflight where a 50% drop in the price to orbit will give you more than a 100% increase in flights? So far, the opposite has been happening, where a 50% drop in price only gets you a 10%-20% increase in customers. That is a horrible position to be in unless you are also stealing customers (as SpaceX is doing) from other launcher companies due to you being a new entrant in the market.
This is precisely why many have suggested that SpaceX may eventually raise prices for launches, because the market will bear the price. If they raise prices 100% and only lose 20% of their customers in the process.... what do they have to lose? That is precisely what Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, and the other traditional launcher groups have been doing for some time. Putting a communications satellite into orbit that costs billions of dollars to manufacture in the first place can easily afford to spend a quarter of a billion on launching costs.... so they don't care if they spend a little more as long as the rocket is reliable or at least covered by insurance if it fails. This is also why launch costs until recently have been increasing much faster than inflation.
If we can find some markets for spaceflight (space tourism BTW is one of those markets) where the number of customers increases substantially with even a modest drop in price, a launcher company can make of the loss of profits through volume sales and thus make more profit. That is generally true for many other industries of which computers is particularly true, but hasn't been the case for spaceflight.
I am still undecided if the economic case is prevalent for spaceflight to become much cheaper, and space tourism by itself isn't sufficient to make it happen. Scientific research in space gets it much closer to closing the business case, but not quite. What pushes it well over the edge is space mining.... but unfortunately that requires a huge drop in price before it becomes affordable to bring back refined rare earth metals or platinum from space and the process to bootstrap mining in space simply won't happen if launching a bottle of
I do like the concepts put out by JP Aerospace and their proposal to use airships and some interesting staging in order to get into orbit. It certainly is an innovative approach that if it works out could significantly reduce the cost of access to space by another order of magnitude or more and would make bulk cargo delivery of supplies from the Earth practical. Its only major drawback is that it takes days or weeks in order to get to orbit rather than a few minutes.... and for passenger delivery that might not be the best way to go other than for "steerage" passengers that have no other option available. For bulk goods like rocket fuel, that certainly wouldn't be a problem except for cryogenic issues and even that might have "acceptable losses".
Most of what you say is spot on, and I hope that eventually somebody will start to really work on these things with some real money behind the projects.
There really haven't been any studies conducted on long term exposure to a fractional gravity environment. It is sort of hard to simulate on the Earth, and hasn't been done in space yet. It may be possible to at least halt some bone degeneration if you are exposed to at least some sort of modest acceleration, such as with a rotating wheel of some sort.
Perhaps a greater moral implication would be if the trip to Mars was a one-way trip.... for them and all their posterity. I'm not saying that would necessarily be the case and it may be possible for a young person born on Mars to return and live for the rest of their life on the Earth, but if it becomes a total one-way trip it certainly would change how people perceive travels to that planet.
I'm trying hard to think of some other transportation moguls that have gone down in history like Elon might if he pulls this off. A short list to which Elon might be included someday:
I'm sure you could put add to this list, although it should be noted that none of them really "invented" the thing they are most noted for being associated with as others most definitely preceded them with those inventions and even were competitors. All of these men had egos so huge that even mastery of their particular industry wasn't sufficient. Stanford even went so far as to become governor of California and now has a university named after him. The companies they founded are even all around today (at least in some form).
I'm sure that would stroke the ego of Elon Musk to be included in such a list. Even so, I have to agree with this AC poster that the "conquest of Mars" would permanently enshrine SpaceX and Musk in history books for much of the rest of human history.
Be careful with this guy, he is a noted troll that is as ignorant of spaceflight as he thinks others might have about it. Of course some people think they should do and ignore those who say "no".
I think ITER is going to be a dead end, and is a good example of everything that is wrong with big science and massive research projects. Even if it ends up being energy positive, facilities built using that method are going to be very expensive and mostly custom one-off projects.... pretty much all of the problems that fission plants face and a few new problems on top of that. It certainly isn't going to be "the solution" to solving the world's energy problems even if it works.
If you could build a fusion reactor to fit as the core of a rocket engine (and keep the weight down too), it could conceivably be the route to significantly cut travel time around the solar system. A trip to Mars would be a matter of weeks rather than months, and "artificial gravity" would be due to actual acceleration rather than a centrifuge or some other similar system.
I hope that they get it to work, or at least some method of fusion working at a break-even or better level, but it is currently a shot in the dark. There are other approaches to fusion that might end up working better.
The escape clause is perhaps the one part of the treaty that removes any teeth in the document:
There is nothing that really holds the signers of the treaty to really follow the principles in the treaty. If the need to claim extra-terrestrial real estate comes up, the nation seeking such a claim simply needs to withdraw and wait a year before they have to act. Some other countries might be clogging the local plumbing fixtures if that happens, but the whole treaty is basically a "Mexican stand-off" just waiting for somebody to make the first move before the land rush starts in earnest.
The Moon Treaty tried to fix those "problems", but the countries who ratified that treaty are not the ones that really matter. It nearly was ratified by the U.S. Senate, but the L-5 Society and some other space advocacy groups got some lobbying going before the final vote and instead it was rejected.
You have got to both get a life and learn when to shut up.
The timeshare computing systems were indeed invented by contractors working for the space program, including the timeshare systems. Yes, I'm very much aware of the Dartmouth system.... what do you think motivated these guys to get it going in the first place? NASA needed a system that permitted multiple individuals working simultaneously on the same computer for controlling the rocket. That others worked on related systems and that the argument for who was first can be disputed is more after the fact. BTW... note the dates that you are using here when trying to defend when these systems were developed.... and also note what was happening in terms of NASA funding.
BTW, "real-time operating systems" were also developed for the space program, where timed events could be controlled as well as automated abort systems for the rockets. I really would love to see you find how spaceflight activities had nothing to do with that.
I'm tired of responding to you, especially as you post anonymously and don't have the balls to stand up to your own words with your own name. I guess as a troll on space related stories, you've had a pretty good week.
The amount being spent for the catering is still chicken feed and lost in the statistical noise of the budgetary process. My point is that fuel costs are so minor that it isn't even worth mentioning as an issue for getting into space. Still, your point is valid that setting up a fancy tent with catering staff, plush folding chairs, drinks, and a buffet table for the reporters does seem like an extravagance.
Then again, if you keep the press corps happy they tend to write positive stories about your organization. This is a PR trick as old as it gets, and something these reporters actually expect. If you snub a reporter where they eat some bad chicken at one of these events, they are likely to rip into your organization.... so they do tend to get some very royal treatment at planned events like a space launch. NASA funding depends upon good press reports (or at least no bad news stories) so the expense continues.
Members of "the press" also get a goody bag filled with signed autographs of the astronauts, a media kit (often a book.... sometimes hard covered) that has biographies of all of the astronauts and background information about the spacecraft, and sometimes a few toys and other stuff. A "reporter's notebook" is also often included along with a pile of pencils, pens, and perhaps even a flashlight. Coupons to local merchants aren't out of the question either, not to mention free "wi-fi" or even a hard network connection with broadband speeds.
NASA PR representatives are pros at the job and are especially noted for how well they put on a party for the press.
The two major contributions to computing technology that the Apollo program had was the development of timeshare computing (developed at JSC for mission control) and the use of integrated circuits in the Apollo Guidance Computer.... one of the first large purchases of those chips at a critical time in the development of the microchip industry. At the time NASA accounted for over half of all chip sales in the world, which gave the cash infusion necessary to get the chip fabs established.
While not "inventing modern computing technology", it was an important part of early computing.